RUNNING TIMES

The Shoe Believer

Long before the barefoot-running craze, DANNY ABSHIRE was promoting a better way to run--and building a better shoe to run in. Now his revolutionary Newton shoes have the attention of runners, and the competition.

Abshire had no formal training as a fitter. "I learned about the parts of the foot from a bone-anatomy calendar hanging in the shop," he admits. But he had a gift and soon became Aspen's boot guru. He fit boots for professional racers, including several members of the U.S. and Canadian ski teams. "The ski thing," says Abshire, "got me into the foot thing." And as it turned out, the foot thing got him back into running.

In 1978, Abshire's ski-shop boss invited him to train for a five-mile footrace. Abshire hadn't done any serious running since high school. He finished the race in the top 10, "and that got me hooked." More races followed. Eventually, he would compete in ultramarathons. His first, in 1990, was a 35-miler in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He later finished Leadville—the preeminent high-altitude ultramarathon—twice.

Along the way, Abshire met Jennifer Newman when he was back in Tennessee visiting. They eventually married, and in 1988 relocated to Boulder to open a 600-square-foot shop called Active Imprints. The store sold lightweight, custom footbeds compatible with a variety of sport shoes. Molded to create a mirror image of your feet, custom footbeds provide more support and stability than stock insoles (orthotics differ in that they are shaped by a clinician to correct for an injury or anatomical abnormality). Abshire, the consummate pitchman, met with the head of the athletic department at the University of Colorado, based in Boulder, and won contracts to make footbeds for several of its athletic teams. "I was also going to health clubs and talking to podiatrists, telling them about our product. We were there only a couple months and all these elite athletes had heard about us." Paula Newby-Fraser, the eight-time Ironman champion, sought out Abshire when she was recovering from bone-spur surgery. "Somebody told me about this guy, so I went to see him," says Newby-Fraser. "And he grabs my foot and starts moving my big toe around and goes, 'Oh, yeah, I see the problem—you have this hypermobile first metatarsal. Yeah, yeah.' And that was it. He's like this little savant elf that can just see things you would never see. My career was saved by him."

Other athletes followed, including Lorraine Moller, a bronze medalist in the 1992 Olympic Marathon. It was Moller, in turn, who, in 1992, introduced Abshire to Brian Russell, a recreational runner and garage inventor who had been working on a radical new running shoe. Abshire says, "Lorraine wanted us to meet because she'd seen Brian's idea and she knew I had connections with the major brands." Russell had been tinkering with several designs. On some, he had removed the heel entirely. On others, he'd fashioned the heel with a set of six compressible lugs. The goal was the same: to build a low-profile shoe with a bouncy forefoot that paid homage to unshod form but retained ample impact protection. "When Brian showed me the shoe," says Abshire, "it made sense."

Initially, the project progressed incrementally. "While Brian worked on variations, I was busy with my young kids," says Abshire. Eventually, in 1996, Abshire paid for their first patent. Cost: $30,000. "I wanted to make the shoe happen," he says. The following year, Abshire and Russell decided to ramp things up with a fresh batch of prototypes. With Russell's designs "we knew we had a better way to absorb shock and lose less energy," Ab-shire says. What they didn't have was a lot of money.